The worst attacks are the ones you don't even know to look for

Network-security tools have long focused on identifying compromises that they recognise from past encounters, but what do you do about the attacks that you’ve never seen before – or even thought to look for? This question is guiding the development and refinement of a new generation of security-intelligence tools that complement the search for well known and well understood attacks with advanced data analytics that are designed to identify threats by finding anomalous behaviour within an organisation’s IT environment. It’s a more flexible approach that Mike O’Keeffe, Product Director for Financial Crime and Cyber with New Zealand data-analytics success story Wynyard Group, says is proving remarkably good at finding the ‘unknown unknowns’ of network and user behaviour – the threats that you not only can’t detect, but don’t even know…